A user encountered inconsistent behavior with Shopify’s built-in automatic country/region and language redirection settings. Despite having both French browser language and a French IP address, the storefront would randomly display in English instead of French, even though Google search results showed French listings correctly.
Troubleshooting attempts:
Testing across different browsers and incognito mode
Clearing browser cache
Verifying browser language settings were set to French
Monitoring network requests in browser dev tools
Temporarily resetting URL handles in the “Translate and Adapt” app
Key clarification: The Shopify feature relies on browser language settings (accept-language header) rather than IP geolocation, which can be affected by privacy settings in incognito mode.
Resolution: The user disabled Shopify’s native redirection feature and installed a third-party app called “Geos: Geolocation,” which successfully resolved the inconsistent language display issue.
Summarized with AI on October 26.
AI used: claude-sonnet-4-5-20250929.
I have activated the “Country/region Displays the storefront that matches a visitor’s location” and the " Language Displays the language that matches a visitor’s browser, when available" option in the Shopify preferences page and it works well, however the language that is meant to be displayed to the customer depending on his IP address is not always the right one, for some reason it defaults to english.
And it is somewhat random, sometimes it will work and other times not.
No idea which app you are using concerning this question, but from what I know:
if you set up the translations based on browsers, it should be related with browser cache and after clearing, it shall be fine. You can also double test under incognito mode page, and it can give you a more precise translation status.
If you set up the translation based on IP address, it should be related with the settings on your APP end or the proxy settings on user’s end. Better double check and dig out the real cause code.
It’s not based on IP, rather on the preferred language setting in visitors browser.
So if you’re testing it from your computer using VPN, it will still select the same language.
Thank you for your response. I did exactly that, the IP address is in France and my browser language is in France, here is how my listing appears in Google search, and is you can see it’s in French :
Just in case – if you’re using incognito mode, the “accept-language” request header is modified for privacy, so Shopify detection may not see the right info.
Also – you should be able to further diagnose what’s going on if you monitor the “Network” tab in browser dev tools when clicking from google to your site.
If it is based on the settings from Shopify, then it is not based on IP address indeed, it is mostly related to your browser language. You should persuade customers to check their browser language settings and see if it is English by default and if so, that is the cause code.
Try to use different browsers and you may get different results I believe.
Thank for your answer, I did put the language of my browser in french and my IP address is in France but it’s still the same problem, it will sometimes be in French and sometimes it will be in english, it’s quite random. I tried with different browsers and still the same problem. Resetting the url handle for products pages in the “translate and adapt” app seems to solve the problem temporarely though
